Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

A few might even crack open their extremely dusty copies of the Art of Unix Programming

One addendum: whatever you do, don't read the 'Application Protocol Metaformats' section in Chapter 5. It is appallingly bad and should be avoided like the plague.

(I mention this as a meticulously designed high-level IPC system would form a cornerstone of a highly modular DE, so the absolute last thing it needs is to take that material as its guide. Amongst other atrocities, it talks about using HTTP as a transport layer and praises XML-RPC as being very much in the Unix spirit. Anyone who genuinely understands HTTP and REST concepts - i.e. maybe 1% of those who think they do - will tell you such abuse is the very antithesis of Unix good practice. And anyone who believes otherwise should have all their .ini files turned into binary XML format.)